The Reign of the Brown Magician. Lawrence Watt-Evans
didn’t look at the spot where Susan Nguyen’s body had lain for so long. At least he’d made a little progress on that problem—with the help of the fetches he had had the corpse settled on a spare bed, and had put a preserving spell on it as best he could. He had seen how the meats in the fortress kitchen were preserved, and he had painstakingly built up the same magical structure over poor Susan, and it seemed to be working.
But not much else was. He was fairly certain, now, that he’d sent those fetches out on a fool’s errand. He hadn’t given them any directions; he’d just told them, “Go find wizards and bring them here.”
But he hadn’t known what directions to give them. He didn’t even have a map. He had never seen a map of Shadow’s world. He wasn’t even sure there were maps.
He knew the route he had taken to reach the fortress, from the Low Forest of Sunderland across the Starlinshire Downs and the coastal plain to Shadowmarsh; he had looked across the rift valley called Stormcrack and seen Stormcrack Keep, perched on the other side; but where these fit in their world, where Stormcrack lay in relation to Sunderland or Shadowmarsh, he had no idea at all. He thought he remembered Raven mentioning that Stormcrack lay in the Hither Corydians, while the mountains visible from Sunderland were the Further Corydians, but what that meant he didn’t know. He had heard other names, as well, but they were just names.
It wasn’t fair. In all the stories the hero knew where everything was. There were always maps. Tolkien’s books had had maps all over them. Even the movies had maps sometimes.
If Shadow had had any maps, Pel hadn’t found them yet.
How could he find anything, or anyone, without maps, without any means of long-distance communication? And while he could sense fetches and wizards in the matrix, he didn’t know how to guide the red embers toward the white snowflakes and golden spiderwebs; how could his fetches find anyone?
He had sent them out, a dozen of them, with orders to find wizards and bring them back—Taillefer in particular, but if they found any wizard, that would do. But how could they do that? How would they know where to go?
He hadn’t thought this through.
He couldn’t even send notes; most people in this world seemed to be illiterate, and those who weren’t used a different alphabet from the one he knew. He had told the fetches to summon wizards, but he had left it up to them to figure out how to deliver that summons.
They might not be able to; fetches were pretty limited.
He could go out searching on his own, he supposed—but he wasn’t sure just how to best use his magic to travel. Conjuring winds that would blow him around, the way Taillefer did, seemed dangerous and haphazard.
And he wouldn’t know where to go. It was a very big planet. The matrix seemed to stretch to infinity.
He would have to get organized about this. As Shadow’s heir and master of the matrix that controlled all the world’s magic, he was, in theory, ruler of all Faerie; he didn’t need to run his own errands, or send out all his servants. He could order other people to do it all.
And besides, he had told Amy that he intended to be a benevolent ruler here, teach these people how to lead more civilized lives; how could he carry out that promise if he stayed holed up here in his castle, with no contact with the outside world?
It was time to start playing his role properly. He would get this place organized—and that would let him fetch wizards who could teach him how to raise the dead.
And if he did some good for the natives in the process, all the better; they could certainly use some help. The towns and villages he had seen on his way to Shadowmarsh hadn’t exactly been paradise.
He remembered the gibbets in every village, the disembowelled corpses of the people who had offended Shadow—at the very least he could do away with that sort of thing.
He realized that he could start right on his own doorstep—quite literally on his doorstep, where the corpses of half a dozen Imperial soldiers still lay. He hadn’t even done anything about them.
Not that he could do very much, but at least he could have them decently buried.
And after that he could send messengers out to the surrounding villages.
He sat up straight, closed his eyes, and sent out a summons to the fetches still in the fortress, and to the handful of homunculi and other creatures over which he had established his control.
Chapter Three
“I don’t care if you believe me or not,” Amy said wearily. “It’s over, it’s done, and I just want to go home and forget about it.”
“What about the spaceship in your back yard?” Major Johnston asked.
Amy sighed.
She had to admit that Johnston had done his best to make it easy on her; he hadn’t nagged, hadn’t argued, hadn’t pushed when she said she didn’t know something—but on the other hand, he had this annoying habit of finding questions she didn’t want to think about.
“I don’t know,” she said. “What about it?”
“Are you going to just leave it there?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“Assuming you have a choice.”
“I haven’t decided. Do you want it?”
Johnston hesitated, then admitted, “We haven’t decided, either. We might; please let us know before you do anything drastic with it.”
“Sure,” Amy said. “May I go now?”
“Um…” The major hesitated. “Not quite yet, I’m afraid.”
* * * *
“We’ve got the report from Beckett, sir,” the lieutenant said.
Bascombe leaned back. “Let’s have it, then,” he said.
“The formal statement is still being written up, sir, but the gist of it is that several unidentified corpses were found in a field outside Blessingbury that could easily have been the place Thorpe appeared. All but one of the corpses were adult males, in some sort of black livery, carrying swords; the one female wore a gray robe and carried no weapon. All had been killed by blaster fire, but no blasters were found; a more careful search is ongoing.”
Bascombe blinked and straightened up.
“Swords?” he said.
“Yes, sir. That’s what the telepath said, anyway.”
“The bodies—were they human?”
The lieutenant hesitated. “Well, yes, sir, so far as I know,” he said. “The report calls them dark-haired Nordic males, which would certainly seem to imply human. I don’t think any autopsies have been done yet, though.”
“Dark-haired Nordic?”
“Yes, sir, Nordic is the standard term for any pure-blooded white, you know, it’s not just the true…”
“Shut up.”
Bascombe knew Imperial racial classifications as well as anyone; what he didn’t know was why any Imperial citizen, except a few holders of ceremonial titles back on Terra, would be carrying a sword.
Shadow’s creatures might well use swords, but most of them didn’t seem to be genuine human beings. Even the humanoids often had black skin—not the brown of a Negro, but actual black.
On the other hand, the people of Earth were authentic human beings, so far as Bascombe knew. Of the four who had stayed at Base One for several weeks, three had been white, one Azeatic; Bascombe had never seen a Negro Earthman, but that didn’t mean much, since that foursome was hardly a fair sample.
Did Earthpeople still use swords? Earlier reports had indicated that they carried projectile weapons, not blades—gunpowder-and-bullet